New article on the “Links” page

I highly recommend stopping by the Links page, by the way, and visiting some of the articles by David Stone, Kelly Martin, Spirituality is No Excuse and the other writers listed there who have boldly offered opinions other than what is trendy. There are different perspectives represented, from skeptical to spiritual to a combination of both.

Check out the latest article on the list, along with an excerpt below (the whole article is very much worth a read):

As a former psychotherapist, I have witnessed people’s remarkable capacity to unconsciously create realities that recapitulate the conditions of their childhoods, seemingly attracting the same emotional drama again and again. I’ve seen this too in my own life, and marvelled at the apparent magic of it. I’ve also seen how people can transform their lives through conscious efforts, through mindfulness and increased self-knowledge. And there is no doubt ‘reality’ is a mutable and ambiguous thing…

But the notion that we can ‘attract’ whatever we want by focusing on it and visualizing it, that the universe is a kind of giant wishing well that only serves up nasty stuff because we secretly wanted it that way, is a poisonous idea. There’s a scene in The Secret that epitomizes how shallow and toxic this philosophy can become: a man ‘meditates’ in an armchair while making gear-shifting motions with his hand in order to ‘manifest’ for himself the BMW of his dreams. It’s this wedding of ostensibly spiritual practice with consumerism that is particularly insidous. It is the very inversion of the Buddhist precept of nonattachment. Far from encouraging the mindful observation of one’s ego’s desires and fears, New Age-ism places them at stage centre and suggests we really can ‘have it all’…